
Among the most famous examples of "spills" as defined here, or rework as commonly defined, is the first servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, STS-61, in which astronauts installed a set of specialized lenses to correct the flawed main mirror in the telescope. The cost of the telescope itself was 2.5 Billion USD 1990. Estimates of the cost of Service Mission 1, which installed the COSTAR mirror correction system, do vary, but a reasonable range is about 30% of the telescope cost.
Photo courtesy U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
We all waste time, but some people and organizations waste time habitually, on their own, while others are forced to waste time because of someone else's mistakes. We tend to notice only the mandatory time wasting that results from the actions of others, but it's useful to catalog all causes of wasted time. That information can be a guide for investigating just how much of what we do could be avoided if we took appropriate measures.
In that spirit, here's Part I of a catalog of ways we waste time.
- Make-work
- The textbook definition of make-work is any activity that serves no purpose other than to keep someone busy. Supervisors do sometimes assign make-work, but I believe that most make-work is self-assigned. That is, we take on tasks that give us a sense of actually doing something, even though the output produced is of no value. For example, we sometimes devote effort to improving something that's already way past good enough. Or we produce something that might be needed later, when a little time spent in reflection could have revealed the remoteness of the chance of its ever being useful.
- Rework
- Rework is work that was perfectly successful the first time, but which must be done again because the result of our first effort got trashed, lost, or damaged in some way. Maybe the dog ate it. Or we accidentally deleted it. Or we delivered it to the people we were supposed to deliver it to, but they trashed it or lost it or something. Carelessness can be a cause, but often the tools we use are so finicky and badly designed that damaging mistakes happen too often.
- Cleaning up and treatment after spills
- A "spill" is any This catalog of ways we waste time
can be a guide for investigating
just how much of what we do
could be avoided if we took
appropriate measuresincident that creates a need to clean up or repair equipment, facilities, code, or any other factor of production. Spills can also create a need to treat personnel for injuries received. All consequences of spills count as effort. Some of it is very expensive, and little or none of it produces customer value. After-incident reviews are essential to reducing the incidence of spills. - Leaping before looking
- Rushing into something injudiciously can create spills or a need for rework if the rushing led to incorrect modification of — or damage to — deliverable items that subsequently need to be restored. But a more wasteful consequence of rushing is the need to back out work that shouldn't have been done at all. In that case, the waste consists of (a) doing the wrong work; (b) doing the work required to undo the wrong work; and (c) the meetings and debates that were necessary to convince people that the work shouldn't have been done and now needs to be undone.
We'll continue next time exploring some subtler and more-often-overlooked ways we waste time. Next issue in this series
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Related articles
More articles on Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness:
Finding Work in Tough Times: Communications
- Finding work in tough times entails presenting yourself to many people. You'll be conversing, interviewing,
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How to Foresee the Foreseeable: Focus on the Question
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Disjoint Awareness
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Unless our awareness of others' work — and their awareness of ours — matches reality, the
collaboration's objective is at risk.
Red Flags: I
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turnover are two examples.
Red Flags: II
- When we find clear evidence of serious problems in a project or other collaboration, we sometimes realize
that we had overlooked several "red flags" that had foretold trouble. In this Part II of our
review of red flags, we consider communication patterns that are useful indicators of future problems.
See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming May 14: Working with the Overconfident
- A cognitive bias known as the Overconfidence Effect causes us to overestimate the reliability of our judgments. Decisions we make based on those judgments are therefore suspect. But there are steps we can take to make our confidence levels more realistic, and thus make our decisions more reliable. Available here and by RSS on May 14.
And on May 21: Mismanaging Project Managers
- Most organizations hold project managers accountable for project performance. But they don't grant those project managers control of needed resources. Nor do they hold project sponsors or other senior managers accountable for the consequences of their actions when they interfere with project work. Here's a catalog of behaviors worth looking at. Available here and by RSS on May 21.
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